In his book published this summer, The War on Warriors, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defence, described being called up to active duty to guard the streets of Washington, DC, during the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. 

He acknowledged protesters’ First Amendment rights but also seethed at “violent professional agitators” and “armies of armed and violent left-wing extremists” who he said behaved “like twenty-first century hoplites,” referring to a term for well-armed citizen soldiers in ancient Greece.

In a recurring theme for the man who might soon lead history’s most powerful military, he fantasised about treating Americans like overseas combatants.

“Most of us [National Guard soldiers] wanted to fight back,” Hegseth wrote. “Within ten minutes, I became one of them. As your muscles ache and your eyes fill with sweat and dust, you begin to seek closure with a sense of resolve. We could easily have pushed this line back, snatched the leaders or the loudest protesters in Antifa, and sucked them back behind the lines.” 

“If this engagement were to occur in Damarra or Kandahar,” Hegseth continued, “we would be home by breakfast.” 

Hegseth, a Princeton grad who worked as an analyst at Bear Stearns, deployed overseas three times between 2004 and 2012 — to Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan — before becoming a Fox News personality and an advocate for accused and convictedwar criminals. As Trump’s pick for Pentagon chief, his nomination faces turbulence in the Senate both for his far-right beliefs and for an allegation of sexual assault made against him, which Hegseth denies, though his attorney has acknowledged a settlement agreement involving paying his accuser not to tell her story publicly.

In The War on Warriors, Hegseth painted the military as a civilizing force for America’s young men.

“Who knows what the untrained and unconstrained world would have made of these alpha males, but the military made great warriors–and now great citizens,” he wrote of two friends, “masculine football-playing studs” who served their country.

But he’s also explicit that the military — and therefore America — is under attack from supposed left-wing ideologies, and that the military should fight back against the “woke” tide just as it would a foreign enemy. America, he said, is “in a cold civil war” and under attack by “a confederacy of radicals.” In the book, he dedicated considerable time railing against modern laws of war and called on the United States to rewrite them and “fight by its own rules.”

Hegseth’s conception of the American left as the enemy within is the defining theme of The War on Warriors.

On its surface, the book answers the question, “How did the military allow itself to go woke?” According to Hegseth, the existence of women in combat roles, the presence of transgender people in the military, the requirement that soldiers take the “experimental” Covid-19 vaccine, his perception of affirmative action in military promotions, the renaming of military bases named after Confederate generals, and the military’s efforts to root out violent extremism — an effort that affected him at one point — all flow from the same source.

You guessed it: It’s the Marxists in academia, hell-bent on shoving “DEI” and “CRT” — diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory, respectively — down everyone’s throats, along with an “unholy alliance of political ideologues and Pentagon pussies [that] has left our warriors without real defenders in Washington.” 

The effects are obvious, according to Hegseth’s book.

“When I think about my career in uniform, in almost every instance where there has been poor leadership or people in positions they’re not qualified for, it was based on either the reality or the perception of a ‘diversity hire,’” Hegseth wrote. On the other hand, he claimed that woke military bureaucrats have “said Trump supporters are extremists, full stop.” He also linked the supposed push toward progressivism in the military to recruiting troubles. 

“For the past three years, the Pentagon–across all branches–has embraced the social justice messages of gender equality, racial diversity, climate stupidity, vaccine worship, and the LGBTQA+ alphabet soup in their recruiting pushes,” Hegseth wrote. “Only one problem: there just aren’t enough trannies from Brooklyn or lesbians from San Francisco who want to join the 82nd Airborne.” 

Hegseth’s view that “woke” ideology is specifically weakening the military — and America overall — is the generic Republican Party position in 2024. It remains to be seen if Trump bans transgender people from the military, bans women from combat roles, or pursues Hegseth’s other ideological battles once in office.

Elsewhere in the book, Hegseth described fighting “a war on two fronts” — against both “radical Islamist ideology” abroad and also left-wing “domestic enemies at home.”

Just like “an enemy at war,” Hegseth wrote, “The radical Left never stops moving and planning. They do not respect cease-fires, do not abide by the rules of warfare, and do not respect anything except total defeat of their enemy – and then total control.”

In the book, he proposed “a frontal assault” to reclaim the military from the left. And he’s quite explicit this isn’t a political difference of opinion: In the military, Hegseth wrote, “The expectation is that we will defend [the Constitution] against all enemies–both foreign and domestic. Not political opponents, but real enemies. (Yes, Marxists are our enemies.)”

He added in the next paragraph that the left wants America to turn away from the Constitution and “let America’s dynasty fade away.” 

“Those who push DEI/CRT ideology,” Hegseth wrote, are not only hypocrites and Marxists but “traitors.” While regular citizens have First Amendment protections for bad ideas, military leaders who seek to retrain soldiers based on those ideas “are guilty of coercive violence against their neighbours,” he argued.

“The Constitution is our lodestar,” he added later. “Marxists hate the Constitution. DEI and CRT are Marxist philosophies. Therefore DEI and CRT are enemies of our Constitution – domestic enemies.” 

Perhaps most notably in a book obsessed with fighting against perceived “domestic enemies,” Hegseth spent a considerable amount of time in “The War on Warriors” criticising the military’s rules of engagement, and modern international laws of warfare more generally. Military lawyers and limited rules of engagement, he posited, are the real reasons America can’t seem to take its gloves off and win a war.

Speaking on his time in Iraq, for example, Hegseth recalled a judge advocate general — or, as Hegseth wrote, “jagoff” — telling his men that they were not allowed to fire on a hypothetical man carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher “until that RPG becomes a threat. It must be pointed at you with the intent to fire.” Hegseth told his men to disregard the instruction: “Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed.” 

“Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys,” he wrote later. “The fact that we don’t do what is necessary is the reason wars become endless. Modern wars never end, because we won’t finish them.” 

So what is “necessary” to win modern wars? The likely future defence secretary has an answer — in a chapter called “The Laws of War, for Winners.” 

In it, Hegseth decried “hopelessly outdated international laws,” which he argued clash with ancient theories of proportionality and just war, particularly when groups like Al Qaeda don’t respect the Geneva Conventions.

“If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think,” he wrote. “The question we have to ask ourselves is, if we are forced to fight, are we going to fight to win? Or will we fight to make leftists feel good – which means not winning and fighting forever.” 

In the same chapter, he took particular issue with a 2023 update to the Department of Defence’s Law of War Manual — that commanders and other decision-makers must assume people are civilians if there is nothing indicating they are combatants — writing: “In short, this means our troops are going to have to hesitate every time they fire.”

“Our boys should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago,” Hegseth wrote. “America should fight by its own rules. And we should fight to win, or not go at all.”